Measuring Empowerment: an Analytic Framework

Empowerment – the process of enhancing an individual's or group's capacity to make choices and transform those into desired actions and outcomes – is an increasingly familiar term within the World Bank. First given organizational recognition through the World Development Report 2000-01, "empowerment" is now found in the objectives of well over 100 Bank-aided projects and is the subject of numerous learning activities. However, as of yet there is no consistent analytic framework to help those involved in analysis and lending activities structure their thinking about how to operationalize empowerment in different contexts, or how to track empowerment activities or effects.

The framework has been developed as part of an on-going study to identify indicators and instruments for measuring and tracking empowerment. Five country teams are engaged in testing the framework and developing context specific indicators for a range of different projects. These include the participatory budgeting initiative in Brazil, the Women's Development Initiatives Project in Ethiopia, the Community-Based Education Project in Honduras, the Kecamatan Development Project in Indonesia, and the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Nepal. (To find out more about the cross-country study and the individual projects please access the empowerment web-site on htpp://www.worldbank.org/empowerment.)

Concepts

If a person or group is empowered they possess the capacity to make effective choice. As Figure 1 indicates, we suggest that this capacity is primarily influenced by two sets of inter-related factors: agency and opportunity structure. Agency is defined as an actor's ability to make meaningful choices – that is, the actor is able to envisage and purposively choose options. Opportunity structure is defined as those aspects of the context within which actors operate that determine their ability to transform agency into effective action. Working together, these factors give rise to different forms of empowerment. (Figure 1 also indicates an assumed relationship between empowerment outcomes and development outcomes, albeit one that is mediated by a range of other influences. While there is much scattered evidence suggesting this is true, it is something that on-going and proposed empirical work is yet to prove.)

Figure 1. The Relationship between Outcomes and Correlates of Empowerment

In the five country study, a person or group's asset endowment is used as an indicator of agency. These assets include psychological, informational, organizational, material, financial, and human assets.

An actor's opportunity structure is shaped by the presence and operation of formal and informal institutions, or rules of the game. This includes the laws, regulatory frameworks, and norms governing people's behavior.

The form of empowerment a person or group experiences can be, for purposes of analysis, classified as one of four types:

The first form of empowerment is passive access. This refers to an actor's capacity to be present in any domain or sub-domain at any level. Access can be denied for many reasons, including geographic, social or economic positioning of a person or group. If access is not available, such as in a highly inaccessible village cut off from markets during the winter or monsoon months, a person or group in that situation would be classified as being without passive access.

Active participation refers to the expression of voice, i.e. an actor's articulation of his/her needs and concerns. Participation does not imply that the actor has influence, in other words, that his/her voice is heard or taken into account by others. Many consultation exercises are exercises in voice, but not influence.

Influence is the capacity to have one's voice taken into account. Influence may be low even when participation is high.

Control represents a position of ultimate power for a group or individual. It is when an actor or group of actors is completely free to make choices and to transform those into desired actions and outcomes. Control for this study is of two different kinds: (i) in terms of development outcomes obtained, and (ii) in terms of changing the opportunity structure governing access, participation and influence in future time periods.

These four types of empowerment do not necessarily present a desired continuum. For example, it is neither realistic or desirable to have all actors able to exercise control in all situations. Neither is it practical to assume that equal influence is appropriate for all people at all times. What the different forms of empowerment allow us to do is to recognize what form of empowerment is fitting in which settings at any particular time, and to design organizational mechanisms, institutions and monitoring systems that support that form of empowerment.

In addition, the relationship between agency, opportunity structure and form of empowerment is not simple and rarely linear. Both agency and opportunity structure are treated as (a) causal to the form of empowerment of a group or individual, (b) contingent on a certain form of empowerment, and (c) modifiable as a result of empowerment processes.

Context

In practice agency, opportunity structures and forms of empowerment vary according to context. This context can be at the county level or at various levels within countries. Inter country comparisons are difficult to make. For example, the question – is a poor black South African more or less empowered than a poor Scheduled Caste Indian villager and by how much? – is hard to answer in a meaningful way. Therefore, rather than proposing direct comparisons of empowerment across diverse countries and dissimilar contexts, this framework suggests that indirect comparisons can be made, albeit with a great deal of caution and sensitivity to context, when empowerment is treated as operating within different domains of a person's or group's life.

A domain is an area of a person's life; it is a stage upon which specific roles are played out. Three domains are identified:

• the state – in which a person acts as a citizen
• society – in which a person is a social actor, and
• the market – in which a person is an economic actor.

Each of these domains is divided into sub-domains. For example, legal and political are sub-domains of state, credit and labor are sub-domains of market, and household and community are part of society. These domains and sub-domains are those commonly experienced by citizens, even if in different ways in different countries.

Analysis of one level of domain or sub-domain will however not reflect the reality of most people's lives. Within countries people behave in different ways and enjoy different forms of empowerment depending on the level at which they engage. These can minimally be identified as:

• the local level, which comprises the immediate vicinity of a person's everyday life. This is likely to be the level of community.
• the intermediary level, which comprises a vicinity which is familiar but which is not encroached upon on an everyday basis. This is likely to be the level between the community and national level.the macro level, which comprises a vicinity which is the furthest away from the individual. This is likely to be the national level.

For example, in Ethiopia the macro level could correspond to the federal, the intermediary to the woreda and the micro to the kebele or village. In India the macro level might correspond to the state, the intermediary to the district and the local
to the village.

The Framework in Practice

In summary, empowerment can be assessed at different domains of a person's life (the state, the market, society) and at different levels (macro, intermediary and local). Each domain can be divided into sub-domains (see link to full version of paper at end of article.) The intersect of a sub-domain and a level creates the realm. Within the realm, people can experience different forms of empowerment (passive access, active participation, influence, control), answering the question, how much/to what extent is a person empowered. The form of empowerment is contingent upon two clusters of interdependent factors – the agency of the actor and the opportunity structure within which that actor operates. The agency of an actor is largely determined by the actor's asset endowment. His/her opportunity structure is largely determined by the presence and operation of formal and informal institutions. Looking at how agency and opportunity structure affect the form of empowerment sheds light upon the question why an actor is empowered in one way or another. Table 1 summarizes this approach to measuring empowerment.

As examples from the multi-country measuring empowerment study demonstrate, the application of this framework is not difficult. The focus of any effort to measure and explain empowerment will however determine which indicators are chosen and where they are clustered. For example, the Honduras case study examines whether the devolution of authority over schooling matters to community education councils leads to the empowerment of parents vis-ais vis-à-vis school staff. Specifically, it assesses whether and to what extent parents have a say in school-related decision-making. Indicators cluster in the service delivery and community sub-domain, at the local level (see Box 1).

However, as Box 2 demonstrates, in Ethiopia, where the effects of the women's empowerment project provide the context for the enquiry, indicators cluster in the realm created at the intersect of the local level and the sub-domains of household, community, legal services and goods.

Summary

This framework should provide a useful starting point for other researchers interested in tracking and measuring empowerment. It also provides a fundamental framework that can assist in identifying priority areas for future investments in empowerment. The on-going multi-country study is expected to yield country studies with indicators, instruments and explanatory text in September 2004. A cross-country synthesis note will be produced in February 2005. As information and results become available, updates will be tracked on the empowerment website.

**This note was prepared by members of the Empowerment Team: Ruth Alsop, Nina Heinsohn, and Abigail Somma. For more information, please see: http://www.worldbank.org/empowerment.

Back to Empowerment Community of Practice Newsletter (Feb./Mar. 2004)